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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29014299">tango dancer</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/cryptidgay/pseuds/cryptidgay'>cryptidgay</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Blaseball (Video Game)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Death, Drabble, Gen, Prompt Fic, The Hall of Flame, The Trench, set in season 2-3ish — during jaylen's first period of being dead</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 13:01:42</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>854</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29014299</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/cryptidgay/pseuds/cryptidgay</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>She won’t remember these moments, when she gets out; her necromancy is years away still, and she’ll look back on the Trench as an awful haze of absolute nothingness that scares her so much more than she thought anything could. But that’s the future, looking back on the past. </p>
<p>In the present, Jaylen blinks and finds herself off the field, for once.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>10</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>tango dancer</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>written for the prompt jaylen + glass! ty sim!! this version of the trench/the hall was borrowed from <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/baliset/pseuds/baliset">marn</a>.</p>
<p><b>content warnings:</b> dissociation, memory stuff, death, skewed perceptions of reality. jaylen does not have a good time in the trench the first time she's dead; being alone down there until people started dying in s2 fucked with her a bit.</p>
<p>title from tango dancer from ghost quartet.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    
<p></p><div class="">
  <p>In the Trench, time blurs and blurs to the point that she doesn’t know if time is passing at all, most of the time — and everything else goes with it, to the point that her body is mere memory and any sense of <em>where</em> and <em>when</em> and <em>why</em> she’d had before is so long gone every calendar that might’ve marked their passing has crumbled into dust — the Trench is not kind to Jaylen, Jaylen who was thrown into its clutches first, Jaylen who has been there longest and who was alone for long enough to shed parts of herself like flaking drywall — but sometimes, sometimes, there are moments she comes back to herself.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She won’t remember these moments, when she gets out; her necromancy is years away still, and she’ll look back on the Trench as an awful haze of absolute nothingness that scares her so much more than she thought anything could. But that’s the future, looking back on the past. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>In the present, Jaylen blinks and finds herself off the field, for once. There is no ball in her hand, no glove; she can’t remember the last time that was true, and some desperate part of her clamors to <em>keep</em> it true, stay off the field, find whatever the rest of this place — <em>is it even a place she’s in?</em> — has to offer, or just run as far away as her goddamn feet can carry her. The Trench won’t let her. She doesn’t know much, and what she knows is fleeting at best, scraps of conversation that crumble beneath her fingers, but she knows she’s not allowed to stop playing for long. The game is greedy like that.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She has a moment, though. And she is just as greedy; she’s ravenous for anything outside of the game she’s been playing for what feels like a thousand years, since she burned, so she looks around.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>The room seems endless from where she stands. There must be an exit somewhere — she must have gotten <em>here</em> somehow, can’t have just appeared out of thin fucking air — or maybe she could’ve. The rules don’t make sense here. The floor is freezing through the soles of her threadbare sneakers, and she thinks she would be shivering if her body remembered what it was like to be warm, but it is this or it is burning and she’s not sure what’s in-between anymore.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She thinks, at first, that the walls are painted black. Then something moves in the distance, and she realizes they’re all windows, looking out into unfathomable depths of the ocean.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>And in front of the walls — in front of <em>her,</em> directly between her and the thin barrier keeping the sea from tumbling in — is —</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>Well, it’s her. It’s a statue of her. It’s a moment she half-remembers, if she digs through the smoke in her mind: she’s looking up at the sky, the reflected eclipse somehow visible in her sculpted pupils, and her eyes are widening but not yet wide, lips parted in surprise, and a first lick of flame curves off the back of her unbuttoned Garages jersey. They’d announced her death before it had happened — only before by milliseconds, not long enough to <em>do anything,</em> but she had heard the words <em>star player Jaylen Hotdogfingers is incinerated</em> before she’d actually felt the fire, and she hadn’t even had enough time to puzzle out what it meant and be properly afraid.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>Jaylen can see her face, reflected in the glass behind the statue. Two of her: one marble, one flesh. (Is she still flesh? Is she still human, alive, breathing?) She thinks she should look the same as the statue, frozen the same way it is, but the bags under her eyes are dark enough to look skeletal, her cheekbones jutting out at odd angles. There’s still ash on her arms, after however long it’s been. In the statue, her hair is pulled back in a neat ponytail atop her head. In the mirrored water, it tumbles onto her shoulders, dark and dull and tangled to the point that she thinks she would have to cut it all off if she wanted it to ever be neat again. She shifts so her statue blocks her reflection in the glass. Somehow, it’s easier to look at <em>dying</em> than at <em>dead.</em></p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>There are other statues in the hall. She can see them out of the corner of her eye, nearly mistakes them for real people before she remembers she is the only one here. (She can’t be pitching to no one — she hears the balls she throws collide with bats, sees blurs of movement streak across the diamond — but whenever she squints and tries to make the batters solidify into a real person across from her, they vanish. So she must be the only one.)</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She doesn’t approach the other statues. What would be the fucking point?</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>There’s no point to standing in front of her own, either, not really, but still she stares up at herself on a pedestal until, an indeterminate amount of time later, she blinks and is back on the pitching mound.</p>
</div>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>ty for reading! leave a comment! i'm on tumblr @ rogueumpire and twitter @ eviljaylen!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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